What's New in 25A?

NRAO and GBO Users' Policies.  The policies have been updated ahead of the 25A Call for Proposals.

  The NRAO and GBO Users' Policies have undergone several updates:

  • REMINDER: The Dissertation Plan requirements (Section 7.2) were revised to specify that the plan must be written by the student. The Latex and Word templates are available online.
  • The text in the Semester Observing Opportunities (Section 3.2.1) to clarify when proposals may be submitted in response to a Call for Proposals, the requirements for proposals that are Triggered, and the requirements for those wishing to submit proposals requesting future capabilities.
  • Clarifications regarding the criteria for Triggered Proposals were made in Sections 3.2.1 and 3.3.2.

See the NRAO and GBO Users' Policies page.

VLBA PST Sessions

Heightened pressure for VLBA time has increased the importance of setting the GST ranges of sessions accurately in the PST and, if possible, avoiding the regions of highest pressure (normally 18:00 – 06:00 GST, around the Galactic center) that can be seen on the pressure plot in the TAC Report.

As detailed in the PST Manual, the sessions defined in the PST are used by the TAC in their assignment of scheduling priorities, thus sessions that pass through high pressure regions are likely to receive a lower scheduling priority than sessions with the same linear-rank science score in regions of lower pressure. In particular, sessions with a 24-hour GST range are guaranteed to pass through high pressure regions and should be avoided if not essential (e.g., for actual 24 hour observations).

The "Guidelines for Creating VLA Sessions" in the PST Manual contain advice that is also useful in creating VLBA sessions; in particular, proposals with a small number of sources should put each target source into a separate session and sources with a large number of sources should be broken into smaller sessions, grouping nearby sources by GST range.

Users are also encouraged to use Sched or Planobs to manually define their GST range as detailed in the Guide to Proposing rather than using the /Calculate Min/Max GST/ button in the PST.

PST Proposal Template

The NRAO now offers an optional Latex template for proposals.  Proposers are strongly encouraged to use this template for all proposal types - Regular, Large and DDTs and to follow the appropriate guidelines for font size, page margins and references.

 

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